Abstract :

This study investigated the online processing of the relative clause dependency. The participants were native speakers of southern Jordanian Arabic (L1-JA), a grammatical resumption language, and were advanced learners of English as a second language (L2-English), an intrusive resumption language. Another relevant difference between these two languages is that resumption in southern JA ameliorates the RC-island effect, while it does not in English. Two offline acceptability judgment tasks and two online eyetracking reading tasks were conducted in JA (L1) and English (L2). The results revealed that the L2 learners had the pre-requisite grammatical knowledge to process the relative clause dependency in English. They seemed to posit a resumptive pronoun to resolve the dependency inside an RC-island in their L1 and L2 alike. This result demonstrated that the L2 learners in the current study exhibited detailed syntactic processing. By doing so, they diverged from the processing behavior native speakers of English exhibited in processing similar stimuli in previous studies (Traxler and Pickering, 1996; Omaki and Schulz, 2011).  In conclusion, the different processing behavior the L2 learners in this study manifested can be attributed to L1 transfer rather than to shallower, less detailed syntactic processing as proposed by the Shallow Structure Hypothesis.